Aurora released!
Several days ago I released my first app, Aurora for Plex!
Watching movies and TV is one of the best uses of the Vision Pro in my eyes. It's the best cinema you can fit in a backpack by a long shot, and incredibly convenient when you want to escape your small apartment and watch a movie lakeside, or at the top of a volcano.
Unfortunately, the native app situation on the Vision Pro is laking a little, and there isn't an official Plex app for the platform yet. A few apps support connecting to Plex, but they are also Swiss Army knife type applications with support for all sorts of media sources, somewhat cluttered UIs, in some cases very buggy video playback, and in others limited to custom viewing environments which are not comfortable and discard all of the beauty of the default system behaviors (to move the screen use this d-pad of buttons and it will shift around little by little with each button press).
I saw an opportunity to become the unofficial Plex app for Vision Pro by focusing on the service and delivering a simple and focused UI for bringing your content into the system, and leveraging the default system controls/players/windows/etc.
I've been working on this app for a while, working on getting an MVP together. I eventually got the app to a usable place, but was kind of stuck because it felt like the foundation I had used to load data wouldn't serve me in the long run. It would be a huge amount of work to replace, and I'm also really unsure what a solid foundation for an app like this would be, so I got a bit stuck. I took like 3 weeks off to just relax with my husband during his summer break, then a friend pushed me to just put the final polish on the app and get it out.
Thank god for you Jason ❤️
I finally just pulled up my pants and got to putting finished touches on the app:
- I cold-emailed a random person from dribble asking if they could turn their art into an app icon for me, and they blew my mind with their incredible artwork.
- I filled in one feature gap, adding a screen that shows you the shows and movies you have unfinished/next episodes/recently added movies/etc.
- I fixed up a couple visual glitches and added a welcome animation showcasing our beautiful logo
- I added a support screen so that people who run into trouble while using the app can collect their logs and send them to me. (Especially helpful since everyone's Plex server is unique and Plex essentially has anti-documentation)
Within a week I was ready to go, submitted the app for review, and waited 🤞
Getting the email that my app was approved was so incredible. I was so scared that I was going to get a bunch of rejections. I had read a few "things to do before submitting you app" lists, and I felt like I was ready, but I wasn't prepared for the confirmation that I was allowed to be an app publisher.
I wrote a couple posts for the wonderful site reddit.com promoting the app, and relaxed. Let's see how this goes and trust in the leverage I have as the first app built specifically for plex on the Vision Pro.
After about 10 days I have 162 downloads and about a dozen new people finding the app every day. The app is free, which is surely helping acheive a 66% conversion rate on the App Store, and the retention metrics show that a small fraction of those people are continuing to come back to the app every day. This is great news! I'm so excited to put more time into making Aurora a better place to watch your plex content, and hopefully people will continue to appreciate that and eventually help support me with some premium features. I'm so excited to see where this goes!
Checkout https://aurora.cleanplate.studio for more feature info and a quick demo of the app, and if you have an AVP I'd love to hear your thoughts about the app!